Ray Bradbury dead at 91

Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s best-known science-fiction writers, has died at 91.

Author Ray Bradbury is best-known for writing Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.

By:John RogersThe Associated Press, Published on Wed Jun 06 2012

Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s best-known and best loved science fiction writers, has died at the age of 91.

Bradbury, the author of such acclaimed works at Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, died earlier today in Los Angeles, his biographer and family have confirmed.

Grandson Danny Karapetian offered the following homage to the author:

“He (Bradbury) influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it’s always really touching and comforting to hear their stories. His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theatre, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him. He was the biggest kid I know.”

Bradbury broke through in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization. It has been published in more than 30 languages, was made into a TV miniseries and inspired a computer game.

The Martian Chronicles prophesized the banning of books, especially works of fantasy, a theme Bradbury would take on fully in the 1953 release, Fahrenheit 451. Inspired by the Cold War, the rise of television and the author’s passion for libraries, it was an apocalyptic narrative of nuclear war abroad and empty pleasure at home, with firefighters assigned to burn books instead of putting blazes out (451 degrees Fahrenheit, Bradbury had been told, was the temperature at which texts went up in flames).

It was Bradbury’s only true science-fiction work, according to the author, who said all his other works should have been classified as fantasy. “It was a book based on real facts and also on my hatred for people who burn books,” he told The Associated Press in 2002.

Although involved in many futuristic projects, including the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and the Spaceship Earth display at Walt Disney World in Florida, Bradbury was deeply attached to the past. He refused to drive a car or fly, telling the AP that witnessing a fatal traffic accident as a child left behind a permanent fear of automobiles. In his younger years, he got around by bicycle or roller-skates.

“I’m not afraid of machines,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1976. “I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.”

Bradbury’s literary style was honed in pulp magazines and influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he became the rare science fiction writer treated seriously by the literary world. In 2007, he received a special Pulitzer Prize citation “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” Seven years earlier, he received an honorary National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honour given to Philip Roth and Arthur Miller among others.

“Everything I’ve done is a surprise, a wonderful surprise,” Bradbury said during his acceptance speech in 2000. “I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, ‘My God, did I write that? Did I write that?’, because it’s still a surprise.”

Other honours included an Academy Award nomination for an animated film, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. His fame even extended to the moon, where Apollo astronauts named a crater “Dandelion Crater,” in honour of Dandelion Wine, his beloved coming-of-age novel, and an asteroid was named 9766 Bradbury.

Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., the author once described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all.” He claimed to have total recall of his life, dating even to his final weeks in his mother’s womb.

His father, Leonard, a power company lineman, was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, Mass. The author’s mother, Esther, read him The Wizard of Oz. His aunt Neva introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe and gave him a love of autumn, with its pumpkin picking and Halloween costumes.

“If I could have chosen my birthday, Halloween would be it,” he said over the years.

Nightmares that plagued him as a boy also stocked his imagination, as did his youthful delight with the Buck Rogers and Tarzan comic strips, early horror films, Tom Swift adventure books and the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” he said in 1982.

Bradbury’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1934. He became a movie buff and a voracious reader. “I never went to college, so I went to the library,” he explained.

He tried to write at least 1,000 words a day, and sold his first story in 1941. He submitted work to pulp magazines until he was finally accepted by such upscale publications as The New Yorker. Bradbury’s first book, a short story collection called Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.

He was so poor during those years that he didn’t have an office or even a telephone. “When the phone rang in the gas station right across the alley from our house, I’d run to answer it,” he said.

He wrote Fahrenheit 451 at the UCLA library, on typewriters that rented for 10 cents a half hour. He said he carried a sack full of dimes to the library and completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.

Few writers could match the inventiveness of his plots: A boy outwits a vampire by stuffing him with silver coins; a dinosaur mistakes a fog horn for a mating call (filmed as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms); Ernest Hemingway is flown back to life on a time machine. In The Illustrated Man, one of his most famous stories, a man’s tattoo foretells a horrifying deed — he will murder his wife.

A dynamic speaker with a booming, distinctive voice, he could be blunt and gruff. But Bradbury was also a gregarious and friendly man, approachable in public and often generous with his time to readers as well as fellow writers.

In 2009, at a lecture celebrating the first anniversary of a small library in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, Bradbury exhorted his listeners to live their lives as he said he had lived his: “Do what you love and love what you do.”

“If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell,” he shouted to raucous applause.

Until near the end of his life, Bradbury resisted one of the innovations he helped anticipate: electronic books, likening them to burnt metal and urging readers to stick to the old-fashioned pleasures of ink and paper. But in late 2011, as the rights to Fahrenheit 451 were up for renewal, he gave in and allowed his most famous novel to come out in digital form. In return, he received a great deal of money and a special promise from Simon & Schuster: The publisher agreed to make the ebook available to libraries, the only Simon & Schuster ebook at the time that library patrons were allowed to download.

Bradbury is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife of 56 years, died in 2003.

With files from the Star Bruce DeMara

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